The other night, a friend of mine identified my blog posts as confessional. A few weeks ago, my roommate asked me if I write confessional poetry. And I’m thinking about the concept of confession.

I think most writers–at least most writers who write–eventually come across the question of why they themselves have chosen to write. Why writing? Why writing what you’ve written? What made you choose this field? What made you choose these words?

I won’t say writing was my first and only choice. At first I wanted to be a veterinarian.

That soon passed when I realized as a veterinarian, my job would not be petting dogs and playing fetch and cuddling. (Please see the above picture which represents my young, innocent, beautiful ideas of the world.)

Though I’ve thought about it a lot, I can’t quite say why I write–not exactly, or not clearly. I could start the list here and not finish until I run out of blog space. But, I suppose, in the simplest ways, I can describe my most common impulses. I write fiction because I want to escape. I write poetry because I feel no escape. I write non-fiction because I’m repeatedly, relentlessly confronted with reality.

Following these thoughts, I guess when I started blogging I was turning in on myself–folding in on myself. I was trying to peer into the corners I’ve never visited, to visit the thoughts I’d abandoned and beg them for forgiveness. I was trying to connect the pieces of myself, the good and the bad–become cohesive. And I was so much folding in on myself, that I decided to commit to unfolding myself. When blogging, I’m swimming away from the shores of my thoughts, past the waves of my doubts and most personal hopes, and happily finding the ocean of the world.